Summer 2026 Courses To Look Out For!

SPAN 3: Spanish III — Citron (11)

SPAN 3 builds on the foundation established in SPAN 2 with more intensive study of grammar and vocabulary, emphasizing literature and cultural analysis. The course incorporates oral activities, readings, written compositions, and continued practice in a virtual language laboratory, along with weekly drill sessions. Completion of SPAN 3—either on campus or through the LSA+—fulfills the language requirement. Please note that this course does not count toward the Distributive or World Culture Requirements. Enrollment is open to first-year students who qualify by placement test, as well as to students who have successfully completed SPAN 2.

Prerequisite: SPAN 2 / Placement
Distribution: None

SPAN 31: Introduction to Hispanic Studies: 18th and 19th Centuries — Merino (11)

This course offers a chronological survey of major transatlantic literary and cultural movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Students engage with a representative selection of key works from both Spain and Spanish America, exploring the development of literary trends alongside broader cultural production. Through readings that may include literary, visual, and filmic texts, the course examines critical and theoretical issues related to modernity, empire, the Enlightenment, nationalism, gender, and democracy.

Prerequisite: SPAN 20.
Distribution: LIT; WCult: W.

SPAN 73.12: Soccer in Ibero-American — Merino (12)

This course examines the cultural impact of soccer in the Ibero-American world, exploring its influence across literature, film, comics, and media in Spain and Latin America. Students study the historical development of the sport and its evolution in a global context, with attention to its contradictions as well as its social, economic, and political dimensions. The course highlights iconic figures such as Maradona and incorporates analysis of World Cup matches, focusing on countries including Argentina, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay to compare the sociopolitical dynamics surrounding the sport. It also addresses the growth of women’s soccer and the expanding role of women in Spain and Latin America.

Prerequisite: SPAN 20.
Distribution: LIT; WCult: W.

Fall 2026 Courses To Look Out For!

SPAN 73.14: Embodying Care: Immigration, Health, and the Medical Humanities (New Course!) — Reyes (3a)

This seminar integrates the medical humanities with public health and policy to study how migration, race, gender, labor, and colonial histories shape health access, trauma, and healing. Through fiction, theatre, visual art, documentary, and community-engaged methods, students examine immigrant health in U.S. and Latinx contexts and produce bilingual, public-facing work that connects analysis to practice. Creative expression is approached as critique and resilience against structural inequities, while students also learn narrative humility, ethics, and bilingual engagement grounded in community care. As a co-taught course with faculty from Spanish and Portuguese and Geisel, the course fulfills the curricular requirements for each unit. For Hispanic Studies majors and minors, the course counts toward major and minor credits. For Geisel students, the course is integrated into the Spanish Pathway curriculum.

Prerequisite:  SPAN 20
Distribution: LIT; WCult: W.

SPAN 53.04: Spanish for Education: Theories, Methods, and Practices in Language Pedagogy (New Course!) — Rey Agudo (2)

This course builds cross-linguistic awareness in students by surveying theories of second and foreign language acquisition and practices for teaching languages, with a focus on Spanish. The course is designed to include a Social Impact Practicum through the Center for Social Impact. Because of the contents of this course, drill instructors particularly welcome to take this course, but participation is open to all students who meet the pre-requirements.

Prerequisite: SPAN 20
Distribution: INT; WCult:W; Lang: LRP

SPAN 70.01: Great Works of Hispanic Literature: Don Quijote — del Pino (11)

From the time of its publication in 1605 (Part I) and 1615 (Part II), Don Quijote has provoked radically different interpretations. Taking as point of departure both the comic and the romantic interpretations, the course will explore the meaning of the Quijote across the centuries. Its aim will be to understand the Quijote both as an autonomous work of literature and as a highly creative response to the literary and cultural forces from which it was forged. In addition to the historical context and social conflicts in the Hapsburg monarchy, the course will focus on the literary history and the novel as a literary genre and a product of the Medieval “mixtification” which flourished in the Renaissance.

Prerequisite: SPAN 20
Distribution: LIT; WCult.: WC.
 

SPAN 55.16: New Course! Hemingway in Cuba — Brioso-Rieumont (11)

Few American writers have been as closely tied to a place and its history as Ernest Hemingway was to Cuba. In Havana and along its coasts, Hemingway lived, wrote, and witnessed some of the most important political transformations in the Caribbean. This course explores the relationship between writer and place, examining how Cuba shaped Hemingway’s imagination and how his works, in turn, came to shape global perceptions of Cuba and U.S.–Cuba relations.

Prerequisite: SPAN 20
Distribution: LIT; WCult.: WC.

PORT 63.09 / SPAN 63.13: Black Crossroads — Acuña (12)

Black Crossroads introduces students to key questions in cinema, visual culture, and Afro–Latin American cultural production from the 20th and 21st centuries, emphasizing connections across Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking contexts. The course is grounded in “Exuzilhar,” a concept coined by Afro-Brazilian writer Cidinha da Silva that links the crossroads (encruzilhada) with Exu, the Yoruba orisha of mediation, translation, and passage. This framework guides our study of how moving images circulate across linguistic borders in the Afro-Atlantic world—carrying contradictions, generating meaning, and intervening in politics and culture.Treating film as a site where aesthetic form meets social struggle, we will analyze how Afro–Latin American cinemas engage memory, freedom, citizenship, nationhood, systemic racism and sexism, class inequality, and cultural subversion. Students will develop tools for close reading of film form (sound, editing, cinematography, narrative) alongside attention to production, circulation, and reception. Sixteen films—award-winning and experimental—from Brazil, Cuba and across Latin America and the Caribbean anchor the course, supported by literary texts and critical scholarship. 

Prerequisite: SPAN 20
Distribution: ART; WCult: CI

SPAN 43.07: Spooky Spain — Gómez (12)

Modern horror is usually the shocking effect of natural or supernatural events that both logical and scientific modes of thinking cannot properly explain and control. Some of these events have an intrinsically human and social character, and others defy reason’s attempts to insert them into our historical and secular continuum (monsters, ghosts, physiological mutations). In this course, students will be exposed to a variety of horror genres and motifs in some Spanish literary texts, films, and paintings. In these works, we will explore issues such as the (female) body, economic and political crises, the family and the haunted house, religion and modernization, and Nature, among other sources of horrific affects. This will also help us understand the connection between horror, on the one hand, and the uncanny, anxiety, abjection, surprise, guilt, and pleasure, on the other.

Prerequisite: SPAN 20
Distribution: LIT; WCult.: WC

SPAN 40.04: The Secrets of Spanish Surrealism — Del Pino (12)

The course will explore the aesthetics pursuits of some of the most relevant Spanish Avant-garde artists of the 20th century, among them Federico Garcia Lorca and Vicente Aleixandre (poets), Salvador Dali and Maruja Mallo (painters), and Luis Bunuel (film director). We will examine the development of the Avant-garde and Surrealist project within the artistic and political context of the “Generation of 1927”. Readings will include, among others, Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art, Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, Ramon Gomez de la Serna, Ismos, Dali’s autobiography The Secret Life, as well as experimental fiction and poetry by the most accomplished writers of the period.

Prerequisite: SPAN 20
Distribution: LIT; WCult.: WC.

SPAN 45.08: Dreams and Nightmares — Brioso-Rieumont (TBD, TBD)

The course’s main objective is to examine how, when, where, and why opposing dominant narratives of the Cuban revolution developed, and how those narratives (and their perceptions) shifted over time. The Cuban revolution is one of the most debated processes of the 20th century, as defended as it is contested. Why did the Cuban revolution spawn such great dreams in some and such great nightmares in others? What did it mean to live in Cuba in the 1960’s, and what does it mean to live in Cuba today? In this course, we will learn about the Cuban revolution from a variety of vantages: including but not limited to the cultural politics of the revolution, Che Guevara’s new man, Fidel Castro’s political speeches, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs, black political activism, arts and intellectual polemics, Cuban exodus, private entrepreneurship, Barak Obama’s 2016 visit to Cuba, and the country’s current cultural scene. The goal will be to traverse two antagonist positions, the dreams of those who supported the revolution and the nightmares of those who fought against it, in order to understand the complexities of the process and to follow the changes undergone in these positions across time. We will analyze both the abstract utopic projects and the concrete realities of this revolution. Through a study of the intersections of society and politics with arts and culture, students will enrich their understanding of Cuba. They will study the social, political, and economic transformations led by the Cuban revolutionaries, what was missing, destroyed, or gained in the process, and the contradictions inherent in these projects. Students will also have the unique opportunity to converse one-on-one with Pulitzer Prize winner Ada Ferrer and world-renowned Afro-Cuban writer Leonardo Padura.

Prerequisite: SPAN 20
Distribution: LIT; WCult.: WC.

SPAN 65.15: Short Stories in Spanish—Broner (TBD)